We are spending this week at the Hay-on-Wye Literature Festival. My husband Joe is a writer, books are his passion, and the festival is the highlight of his year. He goes to back-to-back talks of authors I have never heard of, whilst Freya, our 18 month old daughter, and I, lounge around on pretentious deckchairs and observe the many hilarities that Hay festival attracts. In amongst this literary crowd, I try to look intelligent with my Guardian newspaper held out in front of me, which was only bought to get the free obligatory cotton festival bag. Where most people use their free bag to carry their newly purchased signed books (with some intensely annoying 'try-hards' strutting around with last years' bag), my bag just seems to collect soggy food leftovers and numerous torn up and chewed-on festival programmes.
I spend time secretly spying on all the media luvvies (who all seem to be sporting baby bumps) sitting all around us on the deckchairs, tapping away on their laptops, whilst having important and urgent sounding conversations on their mobiles, and stroking their pregnant bellies, in a seemingly naïve and carefree 'having a baby is going to be a piece of cake' kind of way. And even though all of these women are beautiful and clever and slightly intimidating. I still feel far superior to them – I have already been through childbirth, and they haven't.
With Freya and I having just shared our second ice-cream, bought mainly for medicinal purposes to cool down little Freya's angry tonsils (she has tonsillitis), but also to try to bribe Freya into liking me as much as she likes Joe, all is tranquil on our patch of grass. We are both content, basking in the sun, in our flip-flops and Doodles, and counting how many visitors are donning posh wellies - there is a lot of competitive welly action going on at this festival.
The tranquillity abruptly ends when Freya suddenly starts growling loudly and in a very unladylike manner, at a passer-by. I look up to see Dom Joly walking past, and then sitting quite close to where we are. Whilst Freya is busy taking an instant dislike to poor old Dom, I am trying to pluck up the courage to take a picture of him on my phone, so that I can send it into Heat magazine and make a fast buck. Joe would disown me if he knew. Anyway, I decide against it, as Dom Joly is very large and quite scary-looking in real life. Instead I decide to remove Freya from the source of her annoyance, fling yet another festival programme in the air to pacify her, and go off in pursuit of something literary and intellectual, to make Joe proud.
After some time in the book tent and much deliberation, we emerge with one book – 'MOG The Forgetful Cat'. I would like to say that it was bought for Freya, but it wasn't. It was totally for my own benefit. It was a book that I had as a child and used to love looking at the pictures, and I spent the rest of the afternoon doing just that, looking at the pictures, whilst Freya chewed the festival programme, and Joe was off taking part in some unfathomable debate with Christopher Hitchens about 1968 being an ending and not a beginning.
As Mariella Frostrup said of Hay Festival in the Guardian on Friday 'It's impossible to pigeonhole the people who go to Hay... It really is a celebration of books of every sort, and people of every sort'.
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